It is of major importance, particularly in the field of material sciences, chemistry and pharmacy, to discover and develop optimized substances and materials with respect to desired cases of application. In this connection, sensor systems represent a special field of application, which are a key technology having a steadily growing number of applications, both in industry and in the private sector. Sensors are used, for example, in technical process monitoring, in the area of environmental protection, in the field of medicine and in the motor vehicle field. A considerable quantity of development work is currently being put especially into the development of faster and highly sensitive sensors having a low cross-sensitivity.
As a rule, up until now, the developments were limited to optimization or modification of known materials. However, there is the problem that, for certain areas of application of the sensor systems, there is a requirement for new materials which cannot be sufficiently covered by conventional methods which are distinguished by the production of individual sensors and a subsequent sequential characterization.
In particular, in the development of new types of sensitive materials or material combinations, it may be expedient to use methods from the field of combinatorial chemistry or so-called high throughput methods. In these methods, parallelized synthesis methods and screening methods are involved, by which new materials and material combinations may be discovered, or known synthesis methods for existing materials may be optimized in a broad field of parameters.
A general representation of high throughput methods is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,925,355, in which document the application of combinatorial chemistry, known in the field of pharmacy, to chemical and material science application areas is proposed.
A device for analyzing a sample plate is described, for example, in published German patent document DE 101 31 581. This device includes a sample plate on which 64 material samples have been applied in matrix fashion, which, in each case, are connected to two electrodes that, in turn, are provided with contact locations to which a means for reversible and addressable contacting to the installation may be brought.